Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

her resolve to marry her fiancé and dedicated herself to caring for him. The heroic determination of the bride to marry her fiancé even though he contracted leprosy before marriage is the result of a rather complex decision. Excluding any love, passion, or any sentiment of friendship for Duoshou, the moral dilemma is hardly acceptable. Zhu Duofu, even if she is not legally bound to any obligation, is not as free as other girls whose families have not yet signed any marriage engagement, because her social condition would be damaged if she does not keep her former engagement. Her self-sacrificing choice may correspond to her subjective sense of duty, but it in fact heightens her prestige in the family and among acquaintances and garners social approval.¹⁴⁸ In an analogous case in the Shangyu district, a betrothed girl insisted on going through with her marriage even though the engagement was dissolved because of her fiancé’s mental illness.¹⁴⁹

These cases show how in fictional literature the subject comes to a parting of the ways that is determined by a subtle combination of outside circumstances and internal inclinations. One finds themselves in the position to make a decision, and in the very process of making this decision, a change of circumstances over which one has no control thereby influences one’s destiny. And the self appears in a more complex dimension, floating between ambitions and desires, self-perfection in search of unity, and through obligations toward parents, relatives, friends, teachers, and the temptation of “escaping from the bitter sea.”¹⁵⁰ The complexity of motivations, interests, and perspectives does not reduce but enrich the discourse of moral responsibility.

A final question concerns the conflicts that highlight the difficulty of solution for moral responsibility and thus the moment of the choice that opens to two opposite alternatives, the positive and the negative, innocence and sin. In the final parts of these reflections, I will discuss this phase because we can find something comparable in Neo-Confucian morality. In European Christianity, the main question which encouraged debate over human responsibility from the early Fathers of the Church to